Being "in touch" has become an increasingly important for some people, i.e., doctors, business executives, attorneys, etc., who have a strong need to be reached wherever they are. Many of these people have a telephone for business, a telephone for home, a mobile cellular telephone for the car, and/or a transportable telephone that can be carried around when not near one of the other telephones. Additionally, some professionals have multiple offices with a telephone in each office. Some work at home in conjunction with an office at a business location for when they are on premises with at least one telephone at each location. In the past, all of these telephones generally had different telephone numbers. As a result, a caller had to know or look up multiple telephone numbers and frequently had to make multiple calls in order to reach a person.
One solution to such problems is a so-called "follow me" service in which the user is assigned one number, i.e., 700-555-1234, and the call can be routed to the current location of the user. In such services, the switch, in response to the 700 number, send a query to a centralized database over a signaling network where the user registers his or her current telephone number. The switch, in response to receiving the current telephone number, can then route the call.
Additionally, local number portability (that is, a person being able to use one telephone number regardless of where they are located) causes additional queries to such localized databases where number portability information is kept. In this scenario, a call is made to a destination directory number, and the call is routed accordingly. However, at the end office where the call would normally be delivered, a determination is made that the call is to be delivered elsewhere. At this point, the destination switch makes a query to a centralized database to find the real destination for the telephone call.
Such use of centralized databases has been adequate in the past for services such as "800" services wherein the call volume has not been overwhelming. However, as more and more services use centralized databases in order to route calls, both the signaling network and the service nodes where these databases are located are becoming more congested with queries. Therefore, a problem in the art is that there is no system and method for achieving rapid response to such database queries.